Two special messages were on my in box this morning. They are filled with all the good things that can come along with the cycles of life. One was from Nephew Gordon who sent a first bunch of pictures of baby Amelia Ann Lane who arrived two days ago. She is his and Deena’s second child; the first is Hudson,
Amelia Ann’s big brother. The second message was from Granddaughter Emma who sent me a thank you note for the Indian hand/rod puppets that I sent her thinking they might be pretty enough to display on her bedroom wall. But, what do I know about what big girls think should go up on their walls for decoration.
What is important is that life goes on and with it all the potential joys of being able to communicate with relatives and friends who live great distances away. I think this invention of the internet and e-mail has done more to bring together people who do not live next door or in the neighborhood. I remember the long motor trips when the family piled into the car and Dad drove smoking his cigar from Newark to Brooklyn and back. There was the phone but the weekly outing to see Grandma and my uncles and aunts were important cycles in our lives.
Phone calls are great but to find transatlantic times to ring up Grandma or Grandpa causes problems. When California calls we are likely to be asleep. When Lady Lil, Carol’s mother was alive and we were in California it was a tricky business to complete that daily call. To this day, Carol thinks of her mother and at the end of the day thinks about calling her and catch her up on what is going on in our lives. This is one of the life cycle events that most families continue but the e-mail has arrived and it is a pretty good substitute. I have been thinking that if the little camera that can be attached to the monitor gets developed so I could actually make it function, then this would be almost as good as the phone call. But, I think that this new development has already passed me by and there are new miracle inventions already available. I Pods, U tubes –?
Our next life cycle event will be a motor trip up to see Jeremy and Alicia’s daughter who is yet to be born when we wend our way up north. Part of the trip will be by auto-train and we will sleep one night on the train in our own little room with a bathroom! This is a first for us. Then on to see family and friends that will take three weeks. We have shared the live cycle events of friends who come down as snow birds and we have get-to-gethers. Our Murphy Bed has been used only a couple of times but this could change as more events move here to South Florida.
Our life-cycle events take a lot of planning time and we are happy to be here to plan for future ones.